Azure Networking Update: New features, deeper Barracuda partnership

Yousef Khalidi, Microsoft CVP, Azure Networking, penned a blog post on Monday announcing a wide range of new features for Microsoft Azure including 100 Gbps (fastest connectivity in public cloud), availability of branch connectivity, new cloud-native security capabilities, and application performance services. Many of these new features will be discussed during Microsoft Ignite 2018, and more information can be found in the Azure Networking booth at Ignite (Booth AIC288).

These new features are part of the Azure mission, per Yousef, to “provide comprehensive networking services that are easy to deploy, manage, scale, and monitor. Customers continue to ask for better ways to connect to the cloud, better protection of their cloud workloads, optimal application performance delivery, and more comprehensive monitoring services.”

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Barracuda worked closely with Microsoft over the past several months to ensure we were tightly integrated with these new features. We continue to follow the mantra of “better together” and ensure that our customers can always leverage the most recent Azure features while benefiting from Barracuda’s enhanced security and management. Two products stand out as very significant for customers deploying Azure.

Two New Azure Products

The first product in this group is the Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN, which is now in General Availability. Barracuda worked with Microsoft to create an automated connection to the Azure Virtual WAN from our CloudGen Firewall, which will allow customers to leverage Azure’s wide network coverage for branch connectivity via the Virtual WAN. Barracuda’s integration contains auto-discovery features so it will find new connections as soon as customers stand them up. More details can be found on our Azure vWAN page.

The second significant announcement is the general availability of Microsoft’s much-heralded native firewall, which offers fully stateful network- and application-level traffic filtering for VNet resources, with built-in high availability and cloud scalability, all delivered as a service. Again, Barracuda engineers worked closely with Microsoft to provide a security policy management solution for customers who are deploying multiple Azure Firewalls. For more information on this product, which is currently in private preview, visit our landing page.

So, check out these new features and our new offerings, and stay tuned as we launch even more comprehensive solutions for Azure in the coming months.

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.